Queer Gothic

Queer Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion features sixteen essays that interrogate queer theory's intersections with the Gothic. By re-visiting the usefulness of the term 'queer' and pushing queer theoretical frameworks into new territory, this volume explores the ways that Gothic and queer work alongside each other: one as a marginalised genre and the other as a marginalised identity. Considering both major and lesser-known Gothic works, and ranging from the canonical (poetry and fiction) to the popular (film, video games, music, and visual and performance art), it offers queer and trans perspectives on a wide selection of Gothic modes, genres and texts from fiction such as Hugh Walpole's The Castle of Otranto to Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate, films from Nosferatu to The Cured and TV shows including In the Flesh and Pose.

This is a book that's urgently needed, and it doesn't disappoint. Its sixteen authors provide an up-to-date exploration of queer Gothic, reflecting a rapidly changing theoretical field and ranging widely across the LGBTQ+ spectrum. The result is a rich, riotous feast of ideas, sure to tantalise, provoke and spark new conversations.

What about the gothic genre lends it so naturally to conversations of queerness and queer theory? What about queer frameworks creates opportunities to investigate the tensions and possibilities of the gothic narrative? Each essay in Ardel Haefele-Thomas's collection seeks to answer these questions by analyzing stories, both classical and contemporary, and examining the ways in which the queer gothic genre offers a place to explore the world when one decides to play by different rules. Written in an engaging manner that will appeal to students and scholars of the genre, Queer Gothic is also accessible to the general reader and may pull people in through its examination of more contemporary gothic storytelling types (e.g., video games and slash fiction). Like most collections, some contributions are stronger and of broader interest than others, but every essay seems like a necessary and relevant piece to the overarching conversation about the queer gothic as a narrative space in which queer dilemmas and desires can be represented and marginalized identities can find their own voice.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

Dr. Ardel Haefele-Thomas is the Chair of LGBT Studies at City College of San Francisco. They have published numerous essays on queer and trans Gothic themes including "Gothic, AIDS, and Sexuality, 1981- present" for Cambridge History of the Gothic edited by Catherine Spooner and Dale Townshend (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and "That Dreadful Thing That Looked Like a Beautiful Girl: Trans Anxiety/Trans Possibility in Three Late Victorian Werewolf Tales" for Transgothic in Literature and Culture edited by Jolene Zigarovich (Routledge Press, 2018). Dr. Haefele-Thomas is also the author of Introduction to Transgender Studies (Columbia University Press, 2019) and Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (University of Wales Press, 2012). They are currently working on a monograph on AIDS Gothic for the University of Wales Press as well as a four volume set of archival, rare, and hard to find nineteenth century British LGBTQI+ materials for Routledge Press. Both projects are forthcoming in 2024.

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